Just another typical 'mommy blog' with a dash of nursing humour

Boys Rooms- Update

A few months back – actually scratch that it was more like almost a year back- I did a little tour of Nate’s ‘Big Boy’ room as well as what we had started doing in Eli’s nursery (here!) but since I’ve added a few new pieces (because I have a shopping addiction when it comes to my kids) I thought I would do a new post and include some links to some of my favourite items in each of their spaces. I’m not sure what it is about baby nursery and children’s rooms but I absolutely LOVE them. I love looking at pictures online or in magazines of beautifully styled rooms for little ones. I love seeing all my friend’s kid’s rooms. I could spend hours wandering through stores in the children’s decor sections. Something about a room dedicated to a teeny, tiny human is magical to me.

Eli’s nursery has always been a happy place for me. When our house was being built, we only had Nate and we always knew which room was going to be his but we were never 100% sure what we were going to do with the other two upstairs bedrooms. I remember thinking one could be a guest room and maybe the other an office or perhaps a workout space for Kurt? But we never really had anything set in stone. I figured we’d eventually have more kids but the day that I walked into this room a few weeks before our official move it date, I knew I wanted this to be our next baby’s nursery. I loved the two large windows and how much natural light it brought it. I loved how it felt large but cozy at the same time. And I loved how I could just picture myself rocking a newborn baby to sleep in this space. I was so over-the-moon excited when a few short weeks after moving in, we found out we were expecting baby number two and almost instantly I began planning out what I wanted Eli’s nursery to look like.

We’ve just started transitioning Eli from sleeping with us to sleeping in his crib and so far it’s kind of a hit and miss; it just depends on the night, how tired he is, how tired I am, and a bunch of other factors. I think the longest he’s slept has been from abut 9 pm until 4 am which is pretty good if you ask me. My biggest problem is that because the boys rooms are upstairs, I have to actually get out of bed and walk upstairs to get Eli when he starts crying and I’m the type of person that once I wake up, it’s extremely hard for me to fall back to sleep. So what do I end up doing as a means to stay in my groggy state? I just bring Eli downstairs to our bed where I can feed him then immediately fall back to sleep. I’m hoping once he starts eating more solids that it will help him stay fuller longer and that perhaps he’ll start fully sleeping through the night. I’m sure it’s just wishful thinking on my part but you never know!

Nate’s room hasn’t changed all that much since my last post but I feel like I need to include him because he is honestly such a great big brother and I kinda feel like I don’t post much about him these days. He’s his own little person now and some days I worry that when he’s older he might look back on all these blog posts and feel embarrassed by them? The older he gets, the more I feel like I might scale back just how much I share about him and the same goes for Eli. There will come a day when these are their stories to tell, not mine so for now I will include Nate as often as possible even if I’m kind of repeating myself here and there.

When I first did these room tours, we had just transitioned Nate from the crib to his big boy bed and I’ll never forget just how excited he was when he saw all the Paw Patrol stickers on the walls. If you know Nate, you know he absolutely LOVES this show; it’s his all-time favourite, although Octonauts has been making a bit of a come back lately. Kurt had taken Nate out for a few hours and I figured that it was about time his bed moved from our room to his so while the boys were away, Mom got to play! I filled the walls with as much Paw Patrol stickers as I could and added a fun poster above his bed for some ‘art work’. I think he managed to sleep in his room for only a few weeks before he decided that he liked Mom and Dad’s bed better. Truth is, I think we were forcing too many changes on him at once. At two and a half we were just starting to potty train him, transitioning him to his big boy room, and trying to prepare him for the arrival of his baby brother which is a lot for a little one to handle. While we were in New York, we had asked for a crib for our hotel room but Nate just ended up sleeping in our bed for the duration of the trip and that caused some major setbacks when we returned home. For the first two weeks, he was waking up in the middle of the night and coming into our bed and neither Kurt nor I would bring him back up to his room. We’ve basically ended up transitioning both boys to their own rooms at the same time and like I said above with Eli, it’s day to day – or rather night to night – with Nate too. Some times he makes it until Kurt leaves for work in the morning and other times, he barely fallen into a deep sleep before he’s downstairs to our room but we’re working on it and I know neither of them are going to be sleeping with us forever so I try not to overly stress about it.

This little nook has always been my favourite part about Nate’s room. From the first moment I saw it on the blueprints, I knew I wanted to make it into a cozy reading nook for him; filled with his books, stuffed animals, and pillows. It’s one of those areas that I always dreamed of having as a kid myself and the more I see him engaging in his books on his own, the happier I become. He loves pulling out his favourite stories and “reading” them out loud to me and Eli and it’s just the cutest thing in the world. I can just see him in a few years asking for that area to be converted into a little ‘gamers’ area, filled a small tv, his tech toys, maybe a small futon couch or a couple of bean bag chairs. As much as I can’t wait to help him decorate his room in the future, I do hope the days leading up to the “Mom, can we change my room around?” go a bit slower than the previous three years have gone!

I think these are my absolute most favourite rooms in our house because they belong to two of my most absolute favourite people ever. I’m so proud of how these rooms turned out and I hope the older Eli gets, the more he loves his room as much as Nate loves his. Even as I’m typing this out, I can hear Nate upstairs running around and saying “Chase, Marshall, Rocky, paw, paw, bone, Rubble…” which I know means he’s playing in his room and pointing out his wall decals haha!